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Missed Call Cost Calculator
Three numbers. Thirty seconds. The honest math on what your unanswered calls are costing you every month — and how much an instant text-back could recover. Everything runs in your browser.
Why missed calls are the most expensive problem nobody measures
Ad spend gets dashboards. Website traffic gets analytics. But the phone — still the highest-intent channel for plumbers, electricians, clinics, salons, lawyers and every local service — usually gets nothing. Nobody counts the calls that didn't connect. So the leak stays invisible, month after month.
The math, in plain words
Take the calls you miss in a typical week and multiply by 4.33 (the average number of weeks in a month). Multiply that by what one average job is worth. That's your monthly revenue at risk. Multiply by twelve for the yearly figure that usually makes owners go quiet.
A concrete example: miss 10 calls a week at $150 a job and you're looking at roughly 43 missed calls a month — $6,500 of revenue walking past your business every 30 days, or $78,000 a year. Even if half those callers eventually reach you another way, the other half called someone else.
Where the 40% recovery estimate comes from
The calculator's "recoverable" figure assumes an instant text-back recovers about 40% of otherwise-lost callers. That's deliberately conservative. The logic: a caller who gets an immediate, personal-feeling text with a booking link has no reason to keep dialling around — the most common outcome is they wait, book, or reply. Businesses running text-back report recovery rates between 30% and 60% depending on trade and response speed; we use the low end so the estimate stays honest.
What the calculator doesn't count (and why the real number is bigger)
- Repeat business. A lost first-time caller is also a lost lifetime customer. One $150 job is often $1,500 over three years.
- Reviews. Callers you save with a fast text become reviewers. Callers you lose become nobody.
- After-hours premium. Emergency and after-hours jobs usually carry the highest margins — exactly the calls you're least likely to answer.
Three ways to shrink the number
1. Answer more calls — the obvious one, and the hardest when you're on a job. 2. Text back instantly — our missed call text back service does this automatically within seconds, 24/7, starting with a free 30-day pilot. 3. Make booking self-serve — a booking link in every message (generate yours free with the SMS template generator) lets midnight callers convert without you lifting a finger.
Run your numbers above. If the yearly figure stings, that's the point — now you know exactly what fixing it is worth.